Twins' bullpen likely to get extra dose of Jax

This story was excerpted from Do-Hyoung Park’s Twins Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

Entering play on Saturday, three relievers were tied atop the WAR leaderboard as the most valuable relief pitchers in baseball, per FanGraphs: Mason Miller of the Athletics, Cade Smith of the Guardians and -- unsurprisingly for anyone who has followed Twins baseball consistently this year -- Minnesota setup man Griffin Jax.

Jax started the season as the Twins' interim closer while Jhoan Duran healed, then has mostly pitched in whatever the most important late-inning situation is ahead of Duran since then -- typically facing the toughest part of the opposing lineup.

The one thing Jax hasn’t done a ton as part of that is to pitch more than one inning, which he did for only the second time all season when he cleaned up the seventh inning for Pablo López in Thursday's 4-3 win over the Rays before continuing for the eighth.

But that’s something that could be pushed moving forward, manager Rocco Baldelli said.

“I would bet in September, it’s going to happen,” Baldelli had said at the end of August. “You always want to keep pitching your guys and you want to keep pitching your best pitchers even more, especially when you’ve lost some games recently.”

Here’s a frequent question I see: Why doesn’t Jax pitch multiple innings, especially when his first inning -- or part of one -- doesn’t involve too many pitches?

For one, the Twins consider not only the number of pitches, but also the number of “ups” -- innings in which a guy pitches -- with the notion that sitting in the dugout, getting cold and then having to lock back in for a high-pressure situation carries more stress on the arm.

Jax also notes that the act of mentally having to lock in for always coming into what’s likely the biggest situation in a ballgame more than once is particularly taxing in those spots.

“I've been trying to do a lot better job this year of not getting too emotional in bigger spots for reasons like that,” Jax said. “It's hard to go out and be super emotional, and pumped up about it, go sit in the dugout for 10-15 minutes, then go out there and recreate it.”

Jax has done that in the past, when he first moved to the bullpen in 2022 -- but acknowledged that he knows, based on the Twins’ situation, that he’ll likely need to do it again.

“It’s a different spot when you’re going up in a one-run ballgame, versus the game is out of hand [back then],” Jax said.

With Jax and Duran the only reliable season-long leverage arms the Twins have had, and the depleted state of the pitching staff as a whole, Jax will be counted on to help carry the load even as he entered Saturday tied for the eighth-most appearances in MLB, which has also almost certainly factored into the innings calculation.